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Puppy Games just told us that they will release the source code for Revenge of the Titans if the Humble Indie Bundle reaches $1.75 million! We're already well past $1.5 million with two days to go, so this should be within reach.

This announcement is special because Revenge of the Titans is a brand-new game, released mere days ago after years of development. This may seem like a reckless leap of faith to some. What if people stop buying it once it's open-source? What if piracy runs rampant? What if people start selling reskinned clones?

Well, we did the experiment with the games of the first bundle, and none of these things happened; sales of those games are as strong as ever. Players seem to understand that open-source software is not always freeware (as discussed here). The games don't have any DRM to begin with, so there's no reason that source code access should increase piracy, and so far, reskinned clones have not been a problem.

Revenge of the Titans has a lot of cool technology that should be interesting for any coders out there, most notably the procedurally-generated levels, dynamic recoloring, lushly-animated UI, and diverse special effects. I hope we make it to $1.75M before the deadline so we can find out how it works!
I am especially interested to see what kind of patches we see. In the first Humble Bundle, it was really interesting to see people publishing patches within 24 hours of the source drop. These patches included a PSP port of Aquaria, an Amiga port of Lugaru, many bug fixes and some interesting experimental features. Revenge of the Titans should be particularly amenable to patches and mods, as it is written in easily deployed Java and configured entirely using XML.

Puppy Games may need a bit of time to release the source code and choose a license. Do you have any preference about which license it should use? If you would like to encourage open source software, please spread the word!